Social Media is an integral part of our daily lives. It is a new way of saying a ‘Hello’ to our friends at our convenient time. I was talking to a friend of mine when I realized that I haven’t spoken with him on phone or in person for months. We meet online and chat regularly, keep abreast with the happening in our life through photographs, videos, blogs etc. The need to meet in person is replaced by being on common social media platforms. When people spend so much of their time on social media, brands also need to make their presence felt, to connect with their target audience, in a unique way. Apart from discussing all the mundane activities people also discuss about brands, share the excitement about a new product launch, write reviews and share good and bad experiences associated with a brand. This is where Social Influencers play a key role in shaping the opinion of the people in their network. Influencer is a person who can influence people to act in a certain way. He is a person who is trusted by people at large. Influencers can be celebrities, politicians, corporate honchos, authors or even common people who have a considerable followers. Influencers active on Social Media are called as Social Influencers.

Social Influencers are a key part of the online marketing strategy of brands. Since they can shape opinions, associating with well known influencers can help to build product image and drive people to make the purchase. But most of the times companies are not sure Where to find these Social Influencers? How to determine whether this Social Influencer has good influence over the target audience?

To answer these questions with certainty lets look into the Important factors that companies must keep in mind when they are looking for influencers on social media.

Influencer on Facebook:

There is hardly anyone on Social Media and not on Facebook. To acertain an Influencers performance you should not only look into the number of page likes but also engagement from fans. Metrics like number of likes, comments and shares for each post help determine the true influence. This is extremely crucial because of the edge rank algorithm from Facebook. More the engagement from fans on Facebook, the more it appears in the newsfeed. To identify your influencers you could use keywords, hashtags to determine what is being said, by whom and what is heard in the industry. Based on this you can shortlist few industry influencers and compare their performance for few weeks. You can then narrow down on the pool of influencers you want to associate with on Facebook.

Influencers on Twitter:

Everything you post on Twitter will appear in the newsfeed of the followers one by one. The metric here to ascertain the influence of Influencers is retweet and favourites. The more a tweet is retweeted means more people have seen the tweet.

Influencers on LinkedIn:

LinkedIn plays a very important role for companies in B2B industry. You can begin by conducting a keyword search related to an industry. Instead of searching for “All” select “Articles”. You will find authors of those articles. Gauge the comments and engagement section to find out true Influencers.

There is a chance that one can miss out on potential influencers by conducting an individual search. However there are some Social Influence Tools to ease the process for finding right Influencers.

Social Influence Tools:

Klout: It helps to measure a persons influence score from 1 to 100. Higher the influence score, more valuable is that person for a brand. You can search for influencer related to a particular industry through keywords, topics etc. Metrics compared while determining the Influence score is the number of shares, views, followers etc.

Kred: It is similar to Klout but also gives information about the person’s chances to share others post.

Peer Index: It focuses more on influencers ability to make its audience act rather than other metrics like number of followers etc.

Tweet Reports: It you have a new product launch tweet reports can help you immensely. You can set up hashtags and keyword alerts. Sentiment Analysis chart can help you to determine positive, negative and neutral tweets about a chosen topic.

Littlebird: It helps you to track trending topics and level of participation from influencers.

Twtrland: It is similar to Klout and Kred and helps to find out influencers based on metrics like numbers of likes, shares and so on.

Traackr: It helps you to follow all influencers at one location. It also gives updates as to what every single of them have shared on social networking sites.

Cision Index: It indentifies influencers by focussing on bloggers and their viewership. You can sort blogs by categories and identify influential bloggers.

Most people feel that identifying potential influencers is the toughest part of the job however what they don’t realise is “Maintaining Relationship” is the crux. You can maintain relationship with Influencers by commenting on their blog, sharing their updates and engaging with them by participating in their conversations, opinion polls, webinar etc. You should allow the relationship to blossom into a mutually beneficial one to derive the best results for the brand.